Freedom is absolute. Man is born free, but after the moment of birth he will never again be free. Throughout life there will always be someone above him taking his freedom away. Yet some people are freer than others. They are the ones who were able to keep the most of what they were originally given (or managed to regain some of it). They are more human than us. Who are they?
Being free is simple. It means doing whatever you want; nothing more, nothing less. There can be no restriction to this basic statement. The moment you only allow a person to do as he wants if or as long as he fulfills certain other conditions, he is no longer free. Don’t say: Freedom means doing what you want as long as you are not infringing on the freedom of others. No, then you submit to a law higher than yourself, and thereby you lose your freedom. Unless you can do whatever you want in an absolute sense, you are not absolutely free.
But wait. What I just said may sound horrible and the objections are obvious. Should you be allowed to kill someone if that’s what you want? To this I’m afraid I must answer: Yes, you should. If you are to be free, you should. If that’s what you want, you should. If that’s what you want. You see, I don’t really think you want to do that.
Freedom is simple, perfectly simple, but the will is complicated, awfully complicated.
Everyone wants what is good for oneself. That is what we really want. Do we know what we really want? Do we have any idea? Those few people who come closest to knowing their real will, are those who have done best at preserving their inborn freedom. Maybe certain Buddhist monks or the like have somewhat managed to find their true will by understanding their own true nature in harmony with the universe. The rest of us have inevitably gone astray from the moment we were born. We don’t know what we want, so we cannot be free.
Then we must content ourselves with relative freedom, a lukewarm prosaic relative freedom which is hardly a freedom at all. And so the state steps in with its double-edged sword helping us to be free from ourselves and in the process taking our freedom away.
Then what is freedom?
Our new year 2014 is a century away from that old year of 1914. It was the year of the start of the Great War – the war to end all wars. We are not as naïve as our fathers were a hundred years ago, are we? History has no end, and mankind is still waging its stupid wars. There will be no solution in 2014 either, but the fight continues.
The fight for what? I don’t know, but the people fighting always seem to know. For them there is an historical sense of justice which presumably needs to be fulfilled. “The land is my land and my right is universal, thus my cause is just.” That’s how a soldier must think to be willing to sacrifice all he’s got. But how does he know? History is immensely complicated even for the historian (or maybe particularly for the historian), then how can little people like us, stuck in the narrow perspective of 2014, know the right distribution of historical justice?
In 1914 they were all so sure. The French knew that a part of Germany actually belonged to them, and the Germans were equally sure that their country extended into France. That hundred years old war now looks like a mess. There was a labyrinth of diplomacy and alliances that caused everybody to shoot at everybody. The ancient world blew up and out of the ashes our modern world arose. Where was the justice in these random events? Yet the politics of today is based on the way the cards were shuffled a hundred years ago.
The two global wars of the century formed the borders of our world. The maps of Europe, Africa and the Middle East were shaped by senseless fighting and faulty negotiations and these so-called facts on the ground are the inevitable cause of further fighting.
We, poor soldiers that we all are, want to be a part of something bigger, something that goes beyond our little daily lives and makes it all worth living and dying for, so we are easily deceived. We keep getting stuck in the mud of WWI and the mud of petty politics.
There is a difference between right and wrong, but it is hardly to be found in war and politics.
Therefore, whatever will catch your eye in this AD 2014, don’t be too ready to believe in it, for it goes far beyond what you can see. 2014 was caused by 1914, by 1814, by 1714…
Still, may this year be a happy one!
For those of us who are restricted to following the news of the world through the eyes of the Western press, the state of politics on our planet may seem soothingly simple. There is an eternal battle between Western freedom and Eastern tyranny, and anyone with a healthy state of mind is naturally on the side of the former.
The great theater taking place in the capital of Ukraine seems to be a clear-cut model of this global struggle. Hundreds of thousands take to the streets to demonstrate their will to belong to the European world of freedom and oppose the Russian despotism of their president.
Their numbers sure are impressive, but let’s for a moment step back from the present streets of Kiev and recall one or two easily remembered facts from just a few years ago.
President Yanukovych was actually elected by a popular vote in 2010 and back then there was already a common presumption that he would pull his country away from the EU and in the direction of Moscow. (For some it may even be a surprise that he hasn’t been even more pro-Russian.) That’s what was expected of him on the day of his election, and knowing that a majority of the Ukrainian people chose him. True, he didn’t win by a landslide but a majority is still democratically valid, isn’t it.
Now we may ask if any of the people filling the central square these days were among his electoral supporters three years ago. Probably not many, if any. They were among the 45 percent, or 11 million people who then voted against a closer relationship with Russia, and they haven’t changed their view since.
With this in mind the sizable numbers in the streets constitute nothing new. It is a manifestation of an already existing deep divide in the Ukrainian society – one that was decided in the last election and will have to be played out again in the next one. One part of the country wants to go west and the other one turns east, and there are deep historical reasons for that which are not readily observable on the surface of the streets of Kiev today.
The western leaning part of the country was not in majority at the last election, and even though it is able to crowd the streets it may still be a minority.
In the not so distant past, the military existed to defend the country. At least that’s what the brave citizens of Western democracies were told by their rulers. Pacifistically inclined objectors were appeased by seemingly irrefutable allegories like: “If someone attacked you and your family with an ax, wouldn’t you defend yourself?” Having thus been forced to accede, the interrogator triumphantly eliminated any further attempts at dissent by assuring that defense was the whole purpose of our national armed forces and its extended organization; the NATO.
Oh yes, NATO used to be a glorious institution. It was the peak of mankind’s attempt to tame itself. Until its birth in 1949 human history had been an endless narrative of brutal wars serving no other purpose than the crude quest for power. Kings had incessantly attacked one another solely driven by the thirst for glory or simply for fun. No great ruler could refrain from starting a war to prove his worth, and no one had ever come up with the idea that it was only permissible to take up arms in clear-cut cases of self-defense. Not until the victory of reason in 1949.
“We will never use our mighty army unless a foreign power of evil intent first steps on our borders,” the citizens of the free world were told, and the concept was so simple and convincing and the elected leaders looked so honest, that it was all accepted.
Then came 1989 and it was not so simple anymore. The evil empire of the east ceased to exist, and it was no longer conceivable that anyone could march across our borders. Well, now would have been the moment to prove the honesty of NATO’s rational doctrine “No attack, only defense.” If there is no one to attack, the obvious thing to do is to lean back, enjoy the sunshine and eat the fruit from your garden. But no. The doctrine that had been presented as something belonging to eternal reason had suddenly become irrelevant. That is, it must have been a lie all the time, because eternal truths don’t lose their relevance. The citizens had been lied to all along.
The reason for NATO’s existence was not self-defense. NATO attacked, first in Yugoslavia and in recent memory in several other places. They had lied. They had lied to our face.., but there was no outcry. The entire political spectrum, even the dovish left wing, accepted the turnaround, accepted the lie.
How can you?
These days the West is once again contemplating attack, this time in Syria. Do you really think it is about reason and noble ideas?
Save us from the extremists. They are menacing our society. Their existence is a threat to us and they are dangerous. That, in fact, can be concluded from the very definition of extremism. They want something different, and accordingly they want to abolish what already exists. The idea of elimination and destruction is thus an intrinsic part of their way of thought.
But who are they? Of course they don’t exist independently, but only in a relative sense. They are the others; those who are not like us; those who don’t belong to our majority.
It all depends in what context we place the extremists. Tear them out of our society and send them to another one and they may no longer be extremists. An American left wing relocated to Europe could find a seat in an established party, and a European right wing might feel safer in America. What makes them radical is their failure to adapt to the society in which they live. They believe in something different than the majority.
Or maybe it suffices to say that they believe in something? For the majority, what do they believe in? In the comfortable political center, you need no belief. You settle down lazily and avoid drawing attention to yourself, and for your own sleepy peace of mind you imagine that you belong to your society by nature.
We, the mainstream, are chameleons, and we have no belief. We would rather prefer not to think and that’s why we detest the extremists. They are trying to disturb our peace. They upset us. They want to change us and destroy us.
But the world is in fact changing, and our society is changing too. We see it and we accept it. We are not trying to resist that change, far from it, we, ourselves, are changing. The change may be slower than what the extremists are advocating, but it is still fast. Just a few years ago we looked at things differently and without noticing it we have moved. The fashion is changing and we dress differently. Even our personal taste is changing. What was good and beautiful yesterday may not be so today, because it’s no longer in vogue.
We don’t perceive the change when we ourselves are changing simultaneously. But the extremist wants to pull us against the stream and that we cannot condone. An extremist is someone who is different from us at any given time.
We are not living in political times. The great revolutions are remote history, and the masses no longer fill the streets to demand a better world. True, occasionally paving stones still fly through the air, but they have no direction. The people of discontent don’t know what might satisfy them. They are just feeling a certain annoying but indefinable discomfort and throw without aiming.
Their random disobedience may cause some discomfort to their government, but the rulers never feel threatened. When the straying flock are tired of their own noise, they return home and everything is back to normal. Normality is unbearable, but insanity is also tiresome.
The dark night is a blessing, for then we sleep. What are we to do during the day? Where should we go? No one leads the way anymore. The ideologies are dead.
What were those demonstrations in Brazil about? What was that noise in Turkey? Or in Spain? It’s been two years since the huge crowds camped out in Madrid demanding something they didn’t know themselves. Their number was visible, but their content was hidden and now they are forgotten.
We want something, but we don’t know what we want, for the ideologies are dead.
Nonsense! The ideologies are not dead, and they cannot die. So long as people think, they will put their ideas into a system. (No thought can stand alone; it is always a reaction to other thoughts, one’s own or people’s thoughts.) The ideologies are there but they are blurred and most of us just feel like private citizens.
In the wild world web of ours, we are constantly bombarded with odd and conflicting impulses, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to form a consistent understanding of what it’s all about. We are confused, and that pleases the government.
A confused herd is an obedient herd. The subjects may be straying and sometimes cause some disturbance, but there is no threat of revolution. The existing order is safe.
No, we are not living in political times. We busy ourselves with other things and let those powerful forces rule the world without being interrupted by a conscious human will. It’s better to forget about politics, for we don’t know what we want.
Society is an organism. It consists of parts that are connected together in a more or less well-functioning unity. A society that can contribute to the happiness of its members is a valuable society, but if we disregard this function, does it make sense to speak of society as having an intrinsic value?
A human being is of course also an organism, and it has an intrinsic value. It doesn’t matter whether the person is useful for anything at all, it still has a value. Why?
First we need to be clear about what that word “value” actually means and what we in fact mean when using it. (Like all fashionable words it tends to be overused and easily becomes meaningless.) “Value” indicates that someone wants something. Objects on the money market have a value because some people want to buy them, but what no one wants is valueless. Here there is no intrinsic value. The market decides. A wish must exist in someone’s consciousness to acquire the object, and from that very wish it derives its value. The existence of a consciousness is a prerequisite.
Accordingly a human being has an intrinsic value because obviously it wants its own existence. Human life has a value because at least the person himself wants to live.
Then how about lifeless objects? Natural substances like plants and rocks which don’t possess any consciousness, can they still have an intrinsic value? If so, we will have to imagine the existence of some kind of metaphysical consciousness; a god or some other concept of a superior “will”. What exists in nature is of nature and may be thought to be a part of the general “will” of the universe to preserve itself.
But society? A collective organism has of course no mental consciousness, and since it is a manmade creation, it can hardly be included in some universal “plan”.
What does it matter if a society falls? Well, the people living in it would be disrupted in their lives, so for them of course it has a value, but that’s not what we are talking about. We are asking for its intrinsic value. If society creates little or no happiness for its members, is there any reason to fight for its conservation? Or even if it produces some happiness, is that reason enough to keep the parts which do not contribute to the well-being of the citizens?
The conservative mind would rather want to ignore this question. One often prefers to avoid explaining the rational purpose of various cultural institutions. “We do it because it is our habit and our custom and it was also the way our ancestors did it. That’s just the way it is.” Can a consciously thinking person accept such an answer?
You may love the place where you grew up. That place gave you the first impressions existing in your mind and they are likely to be stronger than anything you have later experienced. Wherever you are now, that place lives in your memory.
For some the memories are bitter. Then the love is conditional or it may not exist at all. The love of one’s home cannot be taken for granted.
How about the love for your country? You also grew up in a country, didn’t you. Your hometown was surely placed within the borders of a country just as it was located somewhere on the planet Earth, but the little child that you once were hardly knew it. The place itself, however, your town or your village, that you knew and that you understood. A place is something concretely existing whereas a country is a constructed abstraction. Those mental images from your childhood are from the place where you actually lived. I don’t think you remember political borders.
You remember places and people from a time that is now gone. Something that was once so close to you, has disappeared and will never come back. It makes you sad. That’s what is called nostalgia. Nostalgia is a kind of love.
Whether it was good or bad, it is likely that you love your lost childhood. As an extension of that feeling, you may love your hometown, but your country, what is that?
A country is a political unit, but no one loves politics. (Only a small city state administers a household which is actually dear to the inhabitants.) But love is devotion, and devoted citizens are extremely useful for politics. The rulers need loyal subjects in their fight against other princes and presidents. They need patriots and therefore patriotism has been cultivated to be used as a political instrument. An illusion has been created. It was taken from a real feeling towards a real entity (the hometown) and transferred to an object which doesn’t really exist.
It is as if you were looking at your beloved, your hometown. You see houses and streets, places where you played as a child and paths you used to walk. While contemplating it all, the real scene gets covered by a mere symbol – maybe a flag or a map, maybe a national costume or the tunes of a national anthem – and you are told that this represents your beloved and that in fact it is your beloved. They call it a country, but no one can show you the country the way they can show you the town, and you settle for the symbolic substitutes. They want you to love a symbol, an illusion. You remember your hometown and accept the deception.
The conservatives change. The most fundamental and eternal conservative values of today are not the same as they used to be.
In the past the demand for democracy was considered an ideology of radicals and revolutionaries, but today the conservative mindset is hardly less democratic than their liberal or socialist counterparts. How is this to be explained?
A prominent feature of conservative ideology is to emphasize the need to adjust to social developments in order to preserve the more basic traditional values. But if that’s the reason for the change of attitude toward democracy, it would mean that democratic values are not values in themselves, but only a means to defend what has a definitive intrinsic value.
The conservative rulers of 19th century Europe undoubtedly made those gradual concessions to democracy in order to prevent what they considered to be worse; a total dissolution of society into revolution and chaos.
But that was then. I’m sure the conservatives of today consider democracy to have an intrinsic value, and that makes them genuine and honest converts. So again I ask: Why have they changed?
It could not have been in order to save the more fundamental values, for evidently those values have themselves changed. Democracy has become a fundamental value.
I just called them converts, but of course the individual conservative has not transformed his personality. It’s the conservatives as a group who are different today. Their spiritual ancestors from the 19th century probably lived in their original belief until their death. That proud aristocrat who had grudgingly admitted democrats into the government of his country probably never ceased to lament the development. Only the subsequent generations of conservatives, people who had been born into a different reality, would view it in another way.
An individual usually retains his fundamental values throughout life, and those values partly originate from the society where he happened to be born. However, we should also assume that a part of our personality is innate and then it seems reasonable to ask: If the conservatives of today had been born in another period of time, what would their attitude toward the democratic ideology have been? There is reason to believe that they would have been just as skeptical as their ancestors. Democracy, their fundamental value, may not be so fundamental after all.
Who believes in politics? Some. Not many. Extremists do, for they want to change the world. Extremists are considered to be mad.
But everyone wants change, right? The cry for change is heard in any election campaign, and no mainstream politician striving for popularity can avoid this magic word.
But what kind of change do they want? For sure, they believe in the system, that is, they believe in nothing.
What is – the system that we have and the conditions in which we live – it is because it is, for something has to be. Our world of today exists by accident. It is a random point in the history of mankind.
You live here and now, but that you have not chosen. What is, doesn’t need your support to be.
You are free to imagine the best of all worlds. In your thoughts you may construct an earth where everything is different. If you could really choose, what would the world look like? Your imagination is limited, but you can still try. If anything were possible, what would you prefer? If you were really free to choose, it’s improbable that you would choose the world in which you actually live, for it is only one of thousands and millions of possibilities. If you were really free to choose…, but you don’t dare. We are creatures of habit to such a degree that we don’t even dare to imagine that we could live differently.
I ask you again: “In what kind of world, in what kind of country, in what kind of political system would you want to live if your choice was perfectly free?”
And you answer: “More or less in the kind of world system that I’m now living in, with only a few adjustments.” And then you add. “I’m a realist, you see.”
Your answer makes me want to tear my hair out! I didn’t give you a realistic choice, I asked you to use your imagination. You are so used to the world in which you happen to live that you can’t even imagine another one. How can you believe in change if you can’t envision something else?
When you elect parties and candidates, your choices are limited to reality, that’s true, but realism is not what limits you. Your imagination is enchained by your habits.
Most people drift toward the political center where they feel safe. In the middle, the world is accepted at it is, and those who belong there, the great majority, say that that is also how the world should be.
We have resigned. We don’t believe in politics.
A Bear - Poles Apart 